Well-known novelist's latest offers Alaska backdrop, but don't mistake it for the real deal

Heroes of the Frontier

By Dave Eggers. Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. 383 pages. $28.95.

In Dave Eggers' new, picaresque novel, a former dentist lights out for Alaska with her two small children. Josie is angry with the father of her children, who was opposed to marriage until he left her to marry another woman. She has lost her dental practice as the result of a malpractice lawsuit. And she's feeling tremendously guilty about the combat death of a young man she encouraged to join the military. On top of all that, she has had it with her hometown, with its "fast-driving women in ponytails" who shop at "a store where food is curated" and criticize her for missing the hundreds of school activities she's expected to attend each year.

So of course, Josie leaves her home in Ohio, flies to Alaska with her children, rents a decrepit motor home, and drives aimlessly around the state. She knows nothing about Alaska, but she does have a sort-of stepsister who lives in Homer.

The journey, then, consists of one (mis)adventure after another as Josie careens among fellow wayfarers, suspect characters and circumstances, and natural disasters. At every fork in the road (literally and metaphorically) she turns the wrong way; she's a champion of making all the wrong choices.

And yet, there's something about Josie that's so outrageous, so tragically intoxicating, that a reader has to love her, has to wonder what she'll do next and wish for her to find some semblance of normalcy in a land that accepts its share of runaways and eccentrics.

If Josie is the dangerously impulsive fly-away protagonist here, her children are the anchors that at least hold her close to Earth. Paul, 8 years old, "with the cold caring eyes of an ice priest" is "far more reasonable and kind and wise than his mother." Ana, 5 years old, is "a constant threat to the social contract," "with a knack for assessing the most breakable object in any room and then breaking it with incredible alacrity."

First stop in Alaska, after a disappointing visit to an animal park, is the town of Seward. Seward helps define "Josie's preferred method of parenting: go someplace like this, with grand scale and much to be discovered, and watch your children wander and injure themselves but not significantly." (This, she says, is the Socratic method.)

On to Homer, where they discover Kachemak Bay and the Homer Spit and partake of a beach barbecue with the sort-of stepsister Sam. Sam, a bird-watching guide, has twin teenage daughters with the "look of medieval warrior-women just back from joyous plundering and man-beating and whale-riding." An incident with a "Homeric delivery truck" alters plans, and the journey resumes — northward to, eventually, a deserted silver mine and the Yukon River.

Eggers has obviously spent time in Alaska, and Alaskans will have fun recognizing locations and "types" he describes here. But his Alaska is imaginatively drawn and should not be confused with the real place. Although the story is set in late August and early September, wildflowers are blooming everywhere and it's fire season. The firefighters respond to the burning forests in fire engines. Josie drives around the state on back roads to avoid the main highways, and the roads apparently extend all the way north and west. Pine trees, crickets, snakes and other species not present in the real Alaska live within these pages, and biting insects do not. Alaska Natives are also absent; Eggers' Alaska is populated by refugees from the Lower 48 — innkeepers, folk musicians, trigger-happy tax evaders and (curiously) Mennonites on bicycles.

Eggers, who's still only in his mid-40s, is a major American writer perhaps best known for "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," his best-selling memoir about raising his young brother after their parents' death. He's also the author of half a dozen novels concerned with social and political issues and the nonfiction "Zeitoun," about a Syrian immigrant and Hurricane Katrina hero wrongly imprisoned on suspicion of being a terrorist. His passions extend beyond writing into educational and human rights activism, including co-founding 826 Valencia, a nonprofit that helps students with writing skills.

In "Heroes of the Frontier," Eggers has had a lot of fun with storytelling — and he is a great storyteller and crafter of sumptuous sentences. But there's more than just a comic romp through Alaska here. Within and behind all the humor lies a critique of modern American life, where consumerism, litigation, self-satisfaction and militarism rule. Josie "had fled the polite, muted violence of her life in Ohio" only to realize that "we are not civilized people." Alaska, with its out-of-control wildfires and individuals searching for fresh starts and meaningful lives, offers the perfect setting for exploring anew the meaning of "frontier."

In an interview on National Public Radio, Eggers said as much. Americans, he said, "have an element of frontier barbarism that's still in our blood." He wanted Josie (who calls Alaska "the barbarian heart" of America) to encounter the rawness and possibility of Alaska as a way of imagining who she, or her children, might become.

Her children, more aware than their mother and capable of finding joy and purpose in a convoluted world, just might survive as the heroes of our tomorrow.

Nancy Lord is a Homer-based writer and former Alaska writer laureate. Her books include "Fishcamp," "Beluga Days" and "Early Warming."